A World On Fire – A Zombie Blog

Writing is going strong and the first draft of A World on Fire: Rage should be ready for viewing by the end of this month or the early start of next month. At this point in the story, I’m reaching a difficult intersection which will take a lot of subsequent drafts to really get it right. Two characters argue religion and philosophy on the rooftop of an abandoned Wendys. The city around them is alive with sporadic gunfire, the screams of the dying, and the constant shrill of car alarms. The world is falling to pieces around them. … Read entire article »

Note … for those of you who a new to the site, A World on Fire is an upcoming trilogy of books that details the fall civilization. The story follows Randell through the post-apocalyptic wasteland where he becomes a slave to rise up as a king. It is a strange combination of Lord of the Rings, Gladiator, and Dawn of the Dead that will keep you on edge of your chair. You can read the opening excerpt right here. – … Read entire article »

Note … for those of you who a new to the site, A World on Fire is an upcoming trilogy of books that details the fall civilization. The story follows Randell through the post-apocalyptic wasteland where he becomes a slave to rise up as a king. It is a strange combination of Lord of the Rings, Gladiator, and Dawn of the Dead that will keep you on edge of your chair. You can read the opening excerpt right here. – Today was a fine day indeed. Two months ago, I decided to stop writing the book, and give it a good read. … Read entire article »

Characters do funny things. They do things that make sense on one level, but things that I just don’t expect on another. In this current scene police officer Simon Mason and sixteen year old Randell Gates are fleeing from a horde of zombies. Mind you, my zombies are more of the Russo type zombies without the speech or the lust for brains. Guns can not kill them. And they do run. Fast. Simon knows this. During the past few days, he worked as part of a task force to round up all the dead so the zombies could be sent to a processing facility. … Read entire article »

Progress of the books? In a word: slow. Sick wife. Sick child. Sick Brian. I feel like we’ve been riding the merry-go-round of pain, and each time the carousel slows to stop, it speeds right back up again as we try to step off of it. Each morning, I weigh the choice … wake up at six and write for two hours, or catch up on sleep. If one of us is particularly sick then the writing must wait. The x factor lately has been my own writing process. I used to believe that a writer should just get it down first, then revise, revise, revise. … Read entire article »

At the start of this year, I decided put my finger on the zombie literary pulse to get an idea where A World on Fire would fit into the zombie literary community. During this frenzied reading period, I got hold of The Rising by Brian Keene. In the book, the main character Dan is traveling through a zombie ravaged landscape to rescue his son. Somewhere near the middle of the book he befriends an elderly black priest named Martin. Dan and Martin discuss a lot of theological views on the zombies, but I left the book disappointed. Their discussions barely addressed the big question.  That is, why would a loving god raise the dead to kill his children? Every time Keene approached the issue, … Read entire article »

The book first is done. The only thing left to do is to finish writing it. I can see you all scratching your head, summoning a phrase uttered by the great Gary Coleman. “What you talking about, Willis?” Writing a book in some ways is like drawing a picture. You focus on one section at a time until everything is unified. And then polish, polish, polish. Up until this weekend, I had a rough sketch of all the parts of the book but one, and it was an irritating space dead center in the middle of the narrative. … Read entire article »

The bad news: with a zombie flu virus infecting my house, not a lot of progress was made this week. The good news: I have finalized my chapters for book one. There will be fourteen in total. Once we move to book two, the chapters will continue to increment based on the first book so the first chapter of book two will be chapter fifteen. This is just one long story. Everything is tightly integrated. For example, a small detail in first book (a security badge tossed aside) becomes a huge detail in the third book (saves the main character’s life). The first book occurs only moments after the first one as if the case with book three. … Read entire article »

Introducing Mehran Samir. He’s a good cop who lives with his his wife, Sunita in a two bedroom house in Medford. Mehran plays by the rules, does his best to serve his community, and he is a kind face to people in need. By all account, he is happily married. He looks forward to having a couple of kids to continue his kind legacy. Like all his other fellow officers, Mehran gets caught in the calamity of the rising dead. He learns firsthand that there is no cure, and realizes far before anyone else that the society will collapse. It is a momentous discovery, for Mehran realizes before anyone else that his actions no longer have lawful consequence. … Read entire article »

This is the opening to the “A World on Fire” series. I’ve tooled with it quite a bit, but it still needs a lot of work to merge with the rest of the book. This is but a taste of the series that will be housed in this website. In a few months, when the first draft is completed, I’ll hitting some of you up as readers. The idea is to produce a finely honed zombie epic that aspires to stand alongside some our great fantasy/sci-fi epics (at least in entertainment value). I like to think of the first book as my version of The Fellowship of the Ring. The second book is a mix of Gladiator and Conan the Barbarian. The third … Read entire article »

Sometime in 1963, Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology, preformed a famous experiment. A test subject was put in front a panel and was told that the panel discharged electric shocks. Another person (an actor) was placed in a different room, connected by a speaker, who was asked a series of questions. For each wrong answer, a man in a lab coat (unidentified to the test subject) told the test subject to administer a shock which increased with each wrong answer. After a succession of volt increases, the actor screamed or beat the wall in simulated pain. If the test subject grew hesitant in delivering the shock, the unidentified man in a lab coat, told them first to “please continue”. … Read entire article »

Destroying the city of Boston … one page at time. This has been a slow burn in the book because so much happens in a short period of time, it’s hard to focus on the parts of the story that matters. When the dead walks the streets, everyone has a story and I can guarantee you that they are all interesting. So I stay focused on my main characters while still painting the nightmare behind them. What’s happening now … Randell (the main character) having discovered his mother has abandoned him takes a midnight train back to the hospital only to find it barricaded by a concrete wall. It is labeled a Green Zone. For authorized personnel only. … Read entire article »

A World on Fire is the name of the series. Rage is the first book in that series. The story is about a sixteen year old teenager, deserted in the bowels of Boston as the dead rise from their slumber to consume the living. Simon, a cop in his mid twenties, takes Randell in his care, and together, they fight for their lives to escape a war zone of soldiers, protesters, and zombies. This is the first half of the first book that I am writing. In time, you will be able to download the audio podcast of it at your leisure so that you can follow Randell’s wanderings through a apocalyptic wasteland. He is a boy who becomes a man and then … Read entire article »

“A World On Fire: Rage” has been proceeding a slow rate during the past month. One of the major problems was switching my sleep schedule which of course threw everything astray. Now that I’m getting the hang of this “waking up at 6 o’clock thing” the book is back on track. This morning I was stuck somewhere on the 160′ish page unable to get my two characters out of the hospital and into the story. The story has been stuck in this lumbering pause for one hundred pages, and this extended scene where Simon, the savior cop, tries to get his fiancee to flee the city with him was falling flat. … Read entire article »